To adopt or not to adopt? Grocery ecommerce adoption: case ePrisma

Abstract

Grocery e-commerce has developed throughout the years and is a constantly progressing field. There has been both academic and commercial interest in exploring what exactly pushes customers to adopt grocery e-commerce, the disruptive innovation. Groceries are an experiential product and have been stated as one of the most complex product groups to sell online. We have different preferences of what the product should look like, and it requires trust to give the task to someone else. For customers, grocery shopping can be relaxing and intriguing, but it seems like a chore, time consuming, and exhausting for many of us. Theoretically, grocery e-commerce can free up time and enable us as consumers to focus on something else. Yet, grocery e-commerce has not taken the whole market by storm, and companies are focusing on how to make the processes more efficient and profitable.

The research question focuses on the adoption of grocery e-commerce and the critical benefits and issues for customers. In addition, this thesis combines the importance of the customer experience and targets to explore potential marketing viewpoints in this. The thesis was written for ePrisma, the grocery e-commerce part of Prisma Peremarket in Estonia.

The chosen paradigm of the research is the post-positivist paradigm. The data for the questionnaire was collected by surveying Prisma Peremarket customers in Estonia by email, and we received 4490 responses. Through various statistical methods such as factor analysis, cluster analysis, and binary logistic regression analysis, the data was processed into the findings and insights about the adoption of grocery e-commerce.

The findings of this thesis can be summarized for three key takeaways: (1) social norms, compatibility, and relative advantage are the main predictors of adoption of grocery e-commerce in Estonia. (2) The most important aspects of grocery e-commerce for adopters are the same as the previously mentioned predictors, while non-adopters focus on perceived risk, social norm, and perceived complexity and view them as an obstacle of adoption. (3) The results of the segmentation model find segments of grocery e-commerce adopters in Estonia, with different focus points on preferred ben- efits of e-commerce. Five distinctive customer segments were created, which can be targeted with different marketing messages.